The idea of travel and picaresque connects with Tepper's earlier fiction, but here the male perspective (s) are new, delightful, and uncanny (“What is it with these women?" Russell was thinking…"Why do they always have to emasculate the male?”), and the landscape is American, ironically recalling all sorts of road trips West, from Grapes of Wrath (and Travels with Charley) to On the Road. I love the characters—Russell as the Gulf war vet and long-distance driver from New Jersey; the decrepit country and western music star, Billy Bud Wilcox, being driven to Colorado; and the three free-loading Gen-Xers they pick up in an Ohio “cowboy bar,” the doper Tad, and two drifter girls, Sonia and Peaches. The dialogue and ensemble voices are lively and authentic—enough so that again, as a Tepper fan, I can easily imagine this novel as a feature film, where Clint Eastwood would make a great Billy. Along with steadily diverting encounters and complications on the way, the characters all have depth and vanishing points, and while Billy’s story is framed from the outside, Russell’s is a warming back to life.
— DeWitt Henry, founding editor of Ploughshares and author of Sweet Marjoram

Susan Tepper takes us on quite a ride through the pages of her new novel, What Drives Men. Our traveling companions are a disillusioned, divorced Gulf War vet, a washed up, hard drinking country western star, a trio of young people that mistakenly think they are living a free-spirited life. Then throw in some gum-popping waitresses, a few hardened barkeeps, and a clairvoyant who learned her trade online. And the guppies, we mustn't forget the guppies. Rarely do these small fish get to be used as metaphor but Tepper deftly gives them their chance in this book. Tepper takes us from New Jersey to Colorado in a vintage Lincoln always, always, hurtling towards hope. What Drives Men is a terrific novel. Read it.
— Linda Adams Blaskey, author of White Horses

REVIEWS

Susan Tepper’s What Drives Men invites the reader to join a rollicking road trip. The passengers range from a geriatric ex-country music star (the client) to a trio of twenty-something kids (invited intruders.) The plot follows the route traveled via cheap motels, slop houses, and tourist traps. As the hungers of three generations clash, uneasy alliances shift the balance of power in the car. The reader is left with vexing questions about how far people will stray to fulfill their desires and what debts random travelers owe one another. What Drives Men is a fast-paced ride that surprises and engages. — Richard Fox, author of Embracing the Burlesque of Collateral Damage

Susan Tepper's characters have a way of steering their way into your head and parking themselves there for a long, long while. Her latest novel, "What Drives Men," offers a compelling narrative twist as Russell, a Gulf War vet whose PTSD- plagued life is a shambles, also takes us out for a calamitous, comedic spin across America's heartland with a cast of caricatures along for the ride that, while exceedingly antithetical to a proverbial buddy/bonding story, is ultimately about self-discovery. As part chauffeur, curmudgeon and counselor on wheels, Russell absolutely rocks. — Harvey Araton, NY Times Columnist and author of Driving Mr. Yogi

What Drives Men gives us a protagonist who's just lost his wife, has a slightly mean, low-life brother, no job, and is attacked by ... well, you'll see. Leave it at this: Russell's attacker is not one of life's major players, like Russell. We love and hate Russell: he's obsessive, selfish, and yet somehow, since we're so often inside his mind, we get to feel at home there, see ourselves there in this sad man who struggles to see himself and the world he's in as they are. His fellow travelers do inexplicable things, adding to the sense of chaos and impending minor disaster that follow Russell everywhere. But we and Russell also encounter rare generosities, strange moments of sympathy and empathy, and though these get lost in his daily obsessions, especially the body parts of every woman he meets— his is a kind of dis-interested but constant sexual curiosity— some of them also merit our empathy. Throughout, Tepper's prose is lucid and witty; a feature I really enjoy is that the chapter titles often signal the way a particular word or thing dominates that chapter: "Winner," the opposite of Russell, is a character's mispronunciation of the winter Russell is driving through both immediately and in his life; the chapter "Power Lines," details a phone call in which Russell is disempowered as usual by his brother, an electrical engineer. And Tepper portrays Russell's attitudes to women with a woman's insight into what drives men. At one point, describing his ex, Russell praises her thinness in contrast to "the monster mode feared by most men...Heavy solid....War-like bodies, warrior bodies, ready to stand up to men. Fight." This novel will amuse you, remind me of your own obsessions and pettiness, and your occasional transcendent moments of kindness and generosity.
— Mary Barbara Moore, author of Eating the Light

Like her previous novel, The Merrill Diaries, Susan Tepper’s What Drives Men takes us on a journey. And once again, Tepper writes in short bursts, both in sentence/fragment structure and in chapter length. Her voice is rapid-fire; clear but sometimes a step ahead of our comprehension. Or at least our expectations. And that’s intentional. While in the former novel, the effect was to uproot us from anything resembling solid ground, following the heroine wherever, and I do mean, “wherever,” she went, in What Drives Men the effect shakes our foundation in a different way. This journey is quite linear in motion, but while the path is relatively straightforward, the ride is no less disrupted – and disrupting. This time, it’s the supporting cast, a nearly-constant cadre of kids and clowns accompanying a country singer that casts us all into cacophony and chaos.

What Drives Men is a dizzying, kaleidoscope of ne’er-do-wells and burnouts challenging an outmatched veteran who suffers from mild PTSD, his annoying but well-intentioned brother, and a beast master employer, all at the service of a hallucinating, delusional has-been country singer.

From the complete disorientation smacking of Kafka and Camus, but with an icy humor, the novel goes for the jugular, the heartstrings, the conscience, and the crotch all at once. Episodes splinter into an untethered journey, like a war without weapons, no less filled with fog and fear.

This is a story of things broken, unstable, and unpredictable. The events these hangers-on usher in are unwelcome, unforeseen, unsettling; a microcosmic world in disarray, out of control. A metaphor.

Take a chance. You’ve got nothing to lose. What’s the worst that could happen?

No dice. Our hero, floundering in uncertainty, toes the waters of what becomes a maelstrom, his comfort zone upended. Though Tepper never tells us, though Russell, the protagonist, never outright realizes it, stateside domesticity echoes the absurdity and horrors of war. Interstate PTSD.

It was a simple job. Supposed to be, anyway. Who saw this coming? Road trip gone wild. And that’s the point.
—Jeff Santosuosso, author of Body of Water

Coincidentally, I started reading this book on an airplane flight from Newark to Colorado... a journey the characters in this modern day picaresque novel take by car. Russell meets the definition of a roguish but sympathetic protagonist, and the cast of misfits he finds himself among—an aging country western star, a brother, a psychic, and three young hangers-on—keep the surprises, shocks, and humor flowing. I was most touched by Russell's insights into his need for connection with his brother. Tepper is a master story teller, and the book is a page-turner. There's a short time frame, punctuated by apt descriptions of diners and seedy motels as Russell, his ornery old charge, and the young folks head west. There are surprises galore which I won't give away in this review. But be prepared - you are in for a wild, raw, and unexpected ride!—Donna Baier Stein, editor of Tiferet Journal and author of Scenes from the Heartland

Susan Tepper gets inside a character’s head and inhabits them lock, stock, and barrel. It’s impossible to believe that her characters don’t exist in real life and are still on their erratic journey. Tepper’s characters are full of spit and vinegar, humor and chaos; capable of unexpected kindnesses, and yet full of deceit.
At first I thought this is a bizarre group of characters on a road to disaster, led by a man of quizzical mind, great impatience, with inherent distrust of humans, or nature, including his own, yet full of integrity when it counts.
As you get to know the characters intimately through dialogue, you suddenly reconnect with the odd assortment of people who have come and gone through your own life, those people in which you scratch your head and wonder why? I was half-way through the book, before I realized those temporary people in my own life were not temporary at all. They remain encased in my consciousness, in minimal or maximum ways, offering the best, or the least redeemable qualities, that have somehow changed my life for better or worse. The book is a journey of redemption.  The characters will last in your memory as well.—Judith A. Lawrence, Ed/publisher of Lilly Press